Our friend Andrew Wessels has reviewed Cyrus Console’s The Odicy at The Quarterly Conversation:
Cyrus Console’s The Odicy begins in a ravaged garden:
I returned, and saw that the garden
Had not moved from me but that some illness
Of the garden carried it away
From me regardless.This ostensible return to paradise is surprising, because we realize that our fall from grace has ruined paradise itself. Console immediately counters the notion that some aspect of nature is safe from the decisions of mankind. The garden paradise myth assumes that when man is forced out, the garden remains intact, pure. This myth, though, predates the development of power plants, chemical processes that leach into waterways, and the spread of air pollution.
You can read the full review here.
And we are very pleased to announce that two of our fall books, Donald Revell’s translation of Last Verses by Jules Laforgue and Elizabeth Robinson’s Three Novels have been reviewed in Publishers Weekly!
Laforgue (1860-1887) will never command the name recognition of Baudelaire or Rimbaud, but he stands just one step below those giants in his importance to European letters: T.S. Eliot said that he found his own style through youthful devotion to the tormented Laforgue, whose self-dramatizing, sometimes self-satirizing, odes and effusions brought free verse to France.
You can read the full review of Last Verses here.
The three novels of the title are Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), and George Gissing’s Eve’s Ransom (1895): three late Victorian novels that might be said to center on women, sleuthing, and connections therein.
You can read the full review of Three Novels here.